Asus ROG GX800VH review: A ludicrous liquid-cooled $6,000-plus laptop

The Asus ROG GX800VH, a liquid cooled monstrosity of a gaming laptop, is one of those things that, like 4K phones or the Apple Watch, is wholly unnecessary yet awfully desirable. Beneath its fully mechanical, RGB-lit keyboard is Intel's top-of-the-line mobile i7-7820HK processor, which is based on the same Kaby Lake architecture as the i7-7700K and is similarly overclockable. There are twoNvidia GeForce GTX 1080 graphics cards paired in SLI, 64GB of DDR4 memory, and an 18.4-inch 4K display with G-Sync. Buying one costs £6,600/$6,300, which is an astonishing amount of money even considering the tech that's included.

The GX800VH certainly isn't for everyone, then, not least those that want the most bang-for-the-buck. But as an example of what's possible on the bleeding edge when money is no object, it's one of the finest pieces of technological willy-waving that we've ever seen.

Buying a GX800VH requires a commitment from both your credit card and your ego. Not only is the laptop itself physically large and covered in orange highlights, but it comes with both a backpack and a suitcase to carry the accompanying liquid cooling unit around—and the graphics on the suitcase are hardly what you'd call subtle. Still, the suitcase—which is filled a pre-cut foam insert for the liquid cooling unit and extra power supply—and bag do make carrying the whole setup around that much easier, should you want to lug it around to a friend's house or, if you're seriously committed to gaming, on holiday.

While the GX800VH uses a mixture of plastics and brushed metal rather than the full-metal chassis you might expect at this price point, it still has a premium feel, which is helped by its substantial weight of 5.7kg. (Suffice it to say, this is not a laptop you will want to move around often, let alone actually use on your lap). Unfortunately, my particular review unit suffered in transit, with the bezel becoming partly separated from the display. The bezel was easy enough to pop back into place, but such damage is hardly the most reassuring start to unboxing a six grand laptop.

As you'd expect for a laptop that's 45mm thick, the GX800VH packs in plenty of ports. There's a 3.5mm headphone jack, a 3.5mm microphone jack, one Thunderbolt 3.0/USB 3.1 Type-C port, one USB 3.1 Type-C port, three USB 3.1 Type-A ports, gigabit Ethernet, one mini-Display Port, and an SD card reader. All that's missing is 10Gb Ethernet, which I'd expect to see at this price point. There's an eight-cell, 76Whr battery inside too, although with battery life that barely scrapes past an hour and a half, I'd consider it more of a backup in case of power cut, rather than a means to actually use the laptop on the go.

The GX800VH comes with its own backpack and suitcase.

Mark Walton

The suitcase holds the liquid cooling dock and second power supply.

Mark Walton

The GX800VH isn't too ostentatious, although the keyboard is RGB.

Mark Walton

That's a n 18-inch, 4K, 60Hz G-Sync display.

Mark Walton

You're not short of I/O on the GX800VH, which includes Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.1.

Mark Walton

There's even an SD card reader.

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On the rear are the ports for the liquid cooling dock.

Mark Walton

The middle port transfers power.

Mark Walton

The 300W power supplies use a hefty connector.

Mark Walton

The keyboard uses Asus' own mechanical switches, but it's great to type on.

Mark Walton

The top is all metal.

Mark Walton

The bottom is removable for access to internal components.

Mark Walton

The liquid cooling dock in all its glory.

Mark Walton

Inside are two radiators and fans.

Mark Walton

There's a power input on the side.

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Where the magic happens.

Mark Walton

Paired up, the laptop and dock make for a large combo.

Mark Walton

The lever on the back docks and undocks the laptop.

Mark Walton

Mark Walton

Alongside the pre-overclocked 4C/8T i7-7820HK processor—the stability of which varies depending on whether you use the liquid cooling unit, and whether you have one or both of the included 300W power supplies plugged in—you get 64GB of 2800MHz DDR4 memory, two GTX 1080 graphics cards, and a pair of PCIe X4 NVMe SSDs in RAID 0 for excessively fast storage (with a spare slot to add another).

There's little you could want for in the GX800VH except perhaps for a processor with more than four cores. If you took just £3,000—less than half the cost of the GX800VH—you could easily build a monster desktop PC with a 10-core processor like the Core i9-7900X.

But then, that would hardly be as interesting would it? The GX800VH's claim to fame is its external liquid cooling unit, which locks into docking ports at the back of the laptop with a satisfying clunk. The way it works is rather clever. Inside the laptop is a heat pipe cooler that covers the CPU and both GPUs. Normally, the heat pipe is cooled via two heatsinks and blower fans that sit at the rear of the laptop. However, when the laptop is docked, liquid is pumped through the heat pipe and out into the docking station, where two radiators and fans are waiting.

The result is both a dramatic reduction in temperatures and an increase in performance versus air cooling alone. Undocked, the CPU—which is overclocked to 4.4GHz by default—is easily throttled in synthetic tests, with temperatures peaking above 91 degrees Celsius. The GPUs, while staying within their own thermal limits at 76 degrees, only hit a top clock speed of 1,721MHz.

Further Reading

Docked, the CPU hits a mere 50 degrees under synthetic load, while the GPU hits 60 degrees and clocks at a much higher 1873MHz. That's almost as high as a desktop GTX 1080, offering more than enough performance to make good use of the built-in 4K 60Hz display.

However, such performance demands that you use both the included 330W power supplies—one plugged into the dock, and the other into the side of the laptop. It's possible to use the laptop with just one power supply, but without enough juice on tap the GPUs don't clock as high. It's also worth noting that liquid cooling, at least in this case, doesn't mean quiet. This is one loud laptop, with only the pitch of the fans changing depending on whether it's docked or not. The noise is certainly more bearable when using the liquid cooling system, but if noise is a concern, a desktop is the way to go.

Performance is, as you'd expect for a computer packing an i7 and two GTX 1080's, impressive. Compared to a GTX 1080 Ti paired with a mighty eight-core Intel processor, the GX800VH often comes in faster at its native display resolution of 4K. That said, SLI support remains something of an oddity. In Hitman, for example, the GX800VH came nowhere near the frame rate of a the lone GTX 1080 Ti. That's not to mention that, across the board, 99th percentile minimum frame times are poor due to increased frame variance caused by rendering across two GPUs. I didn't find it all that noticeable during gameplay, but some are more sensitive to this than others.

Realistically, most people aren't going to buy the GX800VH. A gaming desktop is cheaper, quieter, and a better performer. Even factoring in the cost of a 4K monitor, mouse, and a mechanical keyboard to match the quality of those built into the laptop (the keyboard, despite using Asus' own MechTAG switches, is great to type on), a desktop works out cheaper.

For those that want a gaming laptop specifically, there are far cheaper choices out there, many of which—while still large—aren't as bulky as the GX800VH. Those that want to go slimmer still can look at Nvidia Max-Q laptops like Asus' own Zephyrus, which packs a GTX 1080 into a 18mm thick chassis (just ignore the ergonomically absurd keyboard design if you can).

Further Reading

But then, the GX800VH isn't about practicality or value for money. It's a product that exists because some clever folks figured out a way to make the seemingly impossible—a liquid cooled laptop—work. Even if Asus only ever sells 10 of them (buy it here!), it's heartening to see that something so wonderfully ludicrous exists.

The good

Totally OP specs

Excellent performance

Comfortable mechanical keyboard

A marvel of engineering

Quality 4K G-Sync display

Loads of I/O

The bad

Noisy, even when docked

Needs two power supplies plugged in for full performance

SLI support remains patchy

It's freaking huge

The graphics on that suitcase

The ugly

It costs over six grand. That money is better spent on a desktop.

Latest Ars Video >

War Stories | Ultima Online: The virtual ecology

When creating Ultima Online, Richard Garriott had grand dreams. He and Starr Long planned on implementing a virtual ecology into their massively multiplayer online role-playing game. It was an ambitious system, one that would have cows that graze and predators that eat herbivores. However, once the game went live a small problem had arisen...

War Stories | Ultima Online: The virtual ecology

War Stories | Ultima Online: The virtual ecology

When creating Ultima Online, Richard Garriott had grand dreams. He and Starr Long planned on implementing a virtual ecology into their massively multiplayer online role-playing game. It was an ambitious system, one that would have cows that graze and predators that eat herbivores. However, once the game went live a small problem had arisen...

Where the heck are the "Home" and "End" keys? No, the ones on the numbers don't count.

This thing is completely useless for writing code or serious text editing for that matter. PageUp, Down, Home, End keys are used ALL THE TIME when doing said tasks. And screwing up these keys just ruled out a chunk of power users ever buying this laptop.

I know, right? It probably doesn't even come with emacs or vim installed from the factory. What a gyp.

Making WASD stand out like that... Does anybody actually find that useful? Does anybody who uses WASD for movement (IE, most people) really need to look down on their keyboard to find them, like... ever?

I know lots of gaming keyboards do this, but... Is it actually needed in any way? It mystifies me. Almost as much as the price of this thing mystifies me.

I've got a few quick disconnect couplings in my desktops loop - to make swapping GPUs easier. The advise I got with them is that they're robust enough for normal use; but don't go popping and unpopping them continuously for fun. Hopefully these're a bit more robust....

While I appreciate ars (quite a bit, actually), these reviews are disappointing. I've seen a couple reviews of these massively expensive beast laptops, and I wonder -- why even review these things. Hardly anyone is going to even buy one.

Just seems like it would be much better if something a little more realistic got reviewed. I guess i could always go to another tech site for that, but it would be nice to read them here.

Because the offer from Asus/etc is: "Do you want a sample of this crazy $6k laptop to review?", not "Do you want a sample of this $6k crazy laptop or a normal $2k gaming laptop to review?"

Reviewers who're too busy with other stuff, or who think it's too stupid for words will say no; the remainder will review it because these crazy things get attention far outside their sales levels.

Making WASD stand out like that... Does anybody actually find that useful? Does anybody who uses WASD for movement (IE, most people) really need to look down on their keyboard to find them, like... ever?

I know lots of gaming keyboards do this, but... Is it actually needed in any way? It mystifies me. Almost as much as the price of this thing mystifies me.

WASD annoys the hell out of me. I never understood the whole thing in the eighties/nineties when WASD took root. FFS, just use the mouse in the left hand like a normal person.

On your later point, I think it's unlikely the majority of mouse and keyboard using folk mouse left-handed.

On the first point I may be able to offer a plausible explanation. Even way back in the early days of PC gaming not all keyboards were the same. While having keys with letters of the alphabet (or their local equivalent) is more or less a given, things like numeric pads or arrow keys were not. Various keyboard layouts existed in genuine IBM desktop PC hardware before you even start looking at portables and compatibles of the eighties through to the early 90s and the various laptops of the day.

Obviously having keys you can be certain a player has was more important to early gaming. Thankfully today we can usually rebind keys and connect all manner of control devices if we want to, but back then it was not so easy.

I 100% agree with you that WASD is annoying. I also feel that modern 'gaming' keyboards only perpetuate this crappy legacy design.

I've got a few quick disconnect couplings in my desktops loop - to make swapping GPUs easier. The advise I got with them is that they're robust enough for normal use; but don't go popping and unpopping them continuously for fun. Hopefully these're a bit more robust....

Pretty much anything ever made which has moving parts will fail at some point. It's largely just a question of "how far in the future", which is a bit more salient with, er, anything that costs 6K, really.

While I appreciate ars (quite a bit, actually), these reviews are disappointing. I've seen a couple reviews of these massively expensive beast laptops, and I wonder -- why even review these things. Hardly anyone is going to even buy one.

Just seems like it would be much better if something a little more realistic got reviewed. I guess i could always go to another tech site for that, but it would be nice to read them here.

Wacky laptop reviews like this are the exception, not the rule on Ars. To name but a few:

Making WASD stand out like that... Does anybody actually find that useful? Does anybody who uses WASD for movement (IE, most people) really need to look down on their keyboard to find them, like... ever?

I know lots of gaming keyboards do this, but... Is it actually needed in any way? It mystifies me. Almost as much as the price of this thing mystifies me.

WASD annoys the hell out of me. I never understood the whole thing in the eighties/nineties when WASD took root. FFS, just use the mouse in the left hand like a normal person.

On your later point, I think it's unlikely the majority of mouse and keyboard using folk mouse left-handed.

On the first point I may be able to offer a plausible explanation. Even way back in the early days of PC gaming not all keyboards were the same. While having keys with letters of the alphabet (or their local equivalent) is more or less a given, things like numeric pads or arrow keys were not. Various keyboard layouts existed in genuine IBM desktop PC hardware before you even start looking at portables and compatibles of the eighties through to the early 90s and the various laptops of the day.

Obviously having keys you can be certain a player has was more important to early gaming. Thankfully today we can usually rebind keys and connect all manner of control devices if we want to, but back then it was not so easy.

I 100% agree with you that WASD is annoying. I also feel that modern 'gaming' keyboards only perpetuate this crappy legacy design.

I was being slightly sarcastic sorry - I am a left handed person, and have always used the mouse in my left hand (although now I use it in both, thanks RSI and Old Age!) and couldn't play some games (DOOM) without remapping the bloody things to where they should have been in the first place. Since then I have hated WASD as the stupid compromise it always was.

Every single PC keyboard I have used since... 1989?... has had cursor control in an inverted T. As did my Amiga 500 in 85 and my C64 (well almost) in 82.

Right Handed people need to adapt - The arrow keys are the future! Show some courage!

While I appreciate ars (quite a bit, actually), these reviews are disappointing. I've seen a couple reviews of these massively expensive beast laptops, and I wonder -- why even review these things. Hardly anyone is going to even buy one.

Just seems like it would be much better if something a little more realistic got reviewed. I guess i could always go to another tech site for that, but it would be nice to read them here.

Wacky laptop reviews like this are the exception, not the rule on Ars. To name but a few:

Making WASD stand out like that... Does anybody actually find that useful? Does anybody who uses WASD for movement (IE, most people) really need to look down on their keyboard to find them, like... ever?

I know lots of gaming keyboards do this, but... Is it actually needed in any way? It mystifies me. Almost as much as the price of this thing mystifies me.

WASD annoys the hell out of me. I never understood the whole thing in the eighties/nineties when WASD took root. FFS, just use the mouse in the left hand like a normal person.

On your later point, I think it's unlikely the majority of mouse and keyboard using folk mouse left-handed.

On the first point I may be able to offer a plausible explanation. Even way back in the early days of PC gaming not all keyboards were the same. While having keys with letters of the alphabet (or their local equivalent) is more or less a given, things like numeric pads or arrow keys were not. Various keyboard layouts existed in genuine IBM desktop PC hardware before you even start looking at portables and compatibles of the eighties through to the early 90s and the various laptops of the day.

Obviously having keys you can be certain a player has was more important to early gaming. Thankfully today we can usually rebind keys and connect all manner of control devices if we want to, but back then it was not so easy.

I 100% agree with you that WASD is annoying. I also feel that modern 'gaming' keyboards only perpetuate this crappy legacy design.

I was being slightly sarcastic sorry - I am a left handed person, and have always used the mouse in my left hand (although now I use it in both, thanks RSI and Old Age!) and couldn't play some games (DOOM) without remapping the bloody things to where they should have been in the first place. Since then I have hated WASD as the stupid compromise it always was.

Every single PC keyboard I have used since... 1989?... has had cursor control in an inverted T. As did my Amiga 500 in 85 and my C64 (well almost) in 82.

Right Handed people need to adapt - The arrow keys are the future! Show some courage!

As a lefty who doesn't normally use a right handed mouse remapping back to the arrows is great if all that's used is WASD (and a decent number of titles show WASD on the default keyboard layout but actually support WASD or arrows out of the box). The problem is when a game decides that it can map several keys around WASD to other commonly used functions because the users hand is already there. For slower paced games I can use Ctrl/alt/shift/enter or hit them left handed; anything fast paced is a real problem for me when they do that though. Extra buttons on my mouse can help some too, but they're less than ideal if I need to hit several at once and the numpad buttons on my Razer Naga are small enough my huge thumb tends to hit more than one at a time anyway. I suspect the "proper" solution would be to learn to use 8456 or 5123 on the numpad instead of the arrows but since I don't normally play twitchy games I've never bothered.

Its hard to appreciate a laptop like this. Perhaps as a tech demonstration for what can be accomplished in the gaming laptop space by Asus it might make some sense but I really wonder if it makes any financial sense at all to make something like this at such a price point.

I mean Its big enough that you could consider it competition to a small desktop in terms of portability yet the price puts it at severe disadvantage. Plus it looks edgy enough to turn off a lot of the high performance minded folks that could even afford something like this.

Its a neat gaming laptop of that there is no doubt but you'd probably have to be seriously into flaunting your wealth to throw $6,000 plus on a monster like this.

Where the heck are the "Home" and "End" keys? No, the ones on the numbers don't count.

This thing is completely useless for writing code or serious text editing for that matter. PageUp, Down, Home, End keys are used ALL THE TIME when doing said tasks. And screwing up these keys just ruled out a chunk of power users ever buying this laptop.

I think I see them -- FN+PageUp FN+PageDown.

Sadly that seems to be a trend anymore...along with removing the INSERT and DEL keys. When I was in college I actually had to exchange a new keyboard I bought because we were encouraged to use "vim" for coding and my new keyboard lacked an INSERT key, instead they'd made the DEL key super big.

On my current Dell laptop at home it has the HOME/END as FN+ arrow keys which isn't as bad as it sounds but the PageUP/PageDN drive me nuts since it's FN+ arrow at home and adjacent to the arrows on my Dell work laptop.

At least it doesn't look like this high end machine has Chiqulet keys. I passed up a "new" external keyboard at work over Chiqulet keys...I hate them. I'll keep using my well worn "was used when I got it" older keyboard.

Its hard to appreciate a laptop like this. Perhaps as a tech demonstration for what can be accomplished in the gaming laptop space by Asus it might make some sense but I really wonder if it makes any financial sense at all to make something like this at such a price point.

I mean Its big enough that you could consider it competition to a small desktop in terms of portability yet the price puts it at severe disadvantage. Plus it looks edgy enough to turn off a lot of the high performance minded folks that could even afford something like this.

Its a neat gaming laptop of that there is no doubt but you'd probably have to be seriously into flaunting your wealth to throw $6,000 plus on a monster like this.

It's halo product. garner attention to the brand so that people look into them & buy one of their bread & butter models.

Probably does positive things for their engineers to give them interesting thought experiments like this as well. This model is not going to be a huge seller, but maybe something they learned creating this will let them make a better laptop in the future at more realistic price points.

Making WASD stand out like that... Does anybody actually find that useful? Does anybody who uses WASD for movement (IE, most people) really need to look down on their keyboard to find them, like... ever?

I know lots of gaming keyboards do this, but... Is it actually needed in any way? It mystifies me. Almost as much as the price of this thing mystifies me.

WASD annoys the hell out of me. I never understood the whole thing in the eighties/nineties when WASD took root. FFS, just use the mouse in the left hand like a normal person.

On your later point, I think it's unlikely the majority of mouse and keyboard using folk mouse left-handed.

On the first point I may be able to offer a plausible explanation. Even way back in the early days of PC gaming not all keyboards were the same. While having keys with letters of the alphabet (or their local equivalent) is more or less a given, things like numeric pads or arrow keys were not. Various keyboard layouts existed in genuine IBM desktop PC hardware before you even start looking at portables and compatibles of the eighties through to the early 90s and the various laptops of the day.

Obviously having keys you can be certain a player has was more important to early gaming. Thankfully today we can usually rebind keys and connect all manner of control devices if we want to, but back then it was not so easy.

I 100% agree with you that WASD is annoying. I also feel that modern 'gaming' keyboards only perpetuate this crappy legacy design.

I was being slightly sarcastic sorry - I am a left handed person, and have always used the mouse in my left hand (although now I use it in both, thanks RSI and Old Age!) and couldn't play some games (DOOM) without remapping the bloody things to where they should have been in the first place. Since then I have hated WASD as the stupid compromise it always was.

Every single PC keyboard I have used since... 1989?... has had cursor control in an inverted T. As did my Amiga 500 in 85 and my C64 (well almost) in 82.

Right Handed people need to adapt - The arrow keys are the future! Show some courage!

The inverted T isn't on certain models of genuine IBM keyboards of the 80's and some cloners copied them. This one https://clickykeyboards.com/product/ibm ... d-83-key-2 uses numpad and numlock. Even though I am some 30 years removed from having to use that rather strange layout, the model F stuck in my mind. I hated it and scrounged a model M as soon as I could find one.

Edit: Yeah, I understand about better transfer speed, etc. etc. I just have seen too many people losing data in Raid 0 setups.

According to, IIRC one of Anandtech's reviewers, the RAID0 SSD setup is something that the laptop OEMs say they're doing because their customers apparently say they want it. Whether that's clueless consumers, or clueless middlemen at electronic retailers was left unanswered.

Edit: Yeah, I understand about better transfer speed, etc. etc. I just have seen too many people losing data in Raid 0 setups.

I've been running RAID arrays for several years on several machines, using both mechanical drives and SSDs. I have had one arrays fail, with one mechanical drive. But had that drive been the only one in the machine, I still would have lost everything.

Admittedly, I do also run a home server that backs up all clients every night (if they're plugged in). So I don't worry too much about a drive failing. But I haven't had serious issues and I'll continue using RAID0 arrays for years to come. It's a cheap way to get a performance boost, if you can ensure that TRIM works with your controller. You also get to pool multiple smaller drives to one single drive which is really convenient. Every time a machine gets a bigger SSD, another machine can use the old small drive to increase it's array.

Only annoying issue is that it's a lot harder to move full partitions from one set of drives to another. Logical partitions and controller logic makes it more of an adventure than simply transferring the contents of one single drive to another.

My desktop and my aging Alienware 18 "laptop" runs RAID0 and the performance with two SATA drives is almost double. The loss due to overhead is less than 5%

You should be backing up your normal drives anyway, so why worry about arrays failing? If you backup your data, like you already should, there is really no problem. :-)

Where the heck are the "Home" and "End" keys? No, the ones on the numbers don't count.

This thing is completely useless for writing code or serious text editing for that matter. PageUp, Down, Home, End keys are used ALL THE TIME when doing said tasks. And screwing up these keys just ruled out a chunk of power users ever buying this laptop.

Making WASD stand out like that... Does anybody actually find that useful? Does anybody who uses WASD for movement (IE, most people) really need to look down on their keyboard to find them, like... ever?

I know lots of gaming keyboards do this, but... Is it actually needed in any way? It mystifies me. Almost as much as the price of this thing mystifies me.

WASD annoys the hell out of me. I never understood the whole thing in the eighties/nineties when WASD took root. FFS, just use the mouse in the left hand like a normal person.

On your later point, I think it's unlikely the majority of mouse and keyboard using folk mouse left-handed.

On the first point I may be able to offer a plausible explanation. Even way back in the early days of PC gaming not all keyboards were the same. While having keys with letters of the alphabet (or their local equivalent) is more or less a given, things like numeric pads or arrow keys were not. Various keyboard layouts existed in genuine IBM desktop PC hardware before you even start looking at portables and compatibles of the eighties through to the early 90s and the various laptops of the day.

Obviously having keys you can be certain a player has was more important to early gaming. Thankfully today we can usually rebind keys and connect all manner of control devices if we want to, but back then it was not so easy.

I 100% agree with you that WASD is annoying. I also feel that modern 'gaming' keyboards only perpetuate this crappy legacy design.

I was being slightly sarcastic sorry - I am a left handed person, and have always used the mouse in my left hand (although now I use it in both, thanks RSI and Old Age!) and couldn't play some games (DOOM) without remapping the bloody things to where they should have been in the first place. Since then I have hated WASD as the stupid compromise it always was.

Every single PC keyboard I have used since... 1989?... has had cursor control in an inverted T. As did my Amiga 500 in 85 and my C64 (well almost) in 82.

Right Handed people need to adapt - The arrow keys are the future! Show some courage!

I am a lefty. Takes all of two minutes to go into the settings and change the key mapping to the numpad. It's a great way to familiarize myself with the controls available in the game, too. And I like having everything where I want it, not the developer.

I do believe this violates the definition of "laptop" and should be more referred to as a "portable computer". Anything that needs a monster cooling unit attached to the back is both too big and too hot to keep in one's lap anyways.

Where the heck are the "Home" and "End" keys? No, the ones on the numbers don't count.

This thing is completely useless for writing code or serious text editing for that matter. PageUp, Down, Home, End keys are used ALL THE TIME when doing said tasks. And screwing up these keys just ruled out a chunk of power users ever buying this laptop.

Who would EVER use such a laptop for text editing or code writing? Also, serious power users buying this laptop? Are you freakin' kidding? :-D No serious power user on Earth would buy this. It's more of a flashy toy for people who have more money than sense.

Making WASD stand out like that... Does anybody actually find that useful? Does anybody who uses WASD for movement (IE, most people) really need to look down on their keyboard to find them, like... ever?

I know lots of gaming keyboards do this, but... Is it actually needed in any way? It mystifies me. Almost as much as the price of this thing mystifies me.

WASD annoys the hell out of me. I never understood the whole thing in the eighties/nineties when WASD took root. FFS, just use the mouse in the left hand like a normal person.

On your later point, I think it's unlikely the majority of mouse and keyboard using folk mouse left-handed.

On the first point I may be able to offer a plausible explanation. Even way back in the early days of PC gaming not all keyboards were the same. While having keys with letters of the alphabet (or their local equivalent) is more or less a given, things like numeric pads or arrow keys were not. Various keyboard layouts existed in genuine IBM desktop PC hardware before you even start looking at portables and compatibles of the eighties through to the early 90s and the various laptops of the day.

Obviously having keys you can be certain a player has was more important to early gaming. Thankfully today we can usually rebind keys and connect all manner of control devices if we want to, but back then it was not so easy.

I 100% agree with you that WASD is annoying. I also feel that modern 'gaming' keyboards only perpetuate this crappy legacy design.

I was being slightly sarcastic sorry - I am a left handed person, and have always used the mouse in my left hand (although now I use it in both, thanks RSI and Old Age!) and couldn't play some games (DOOM) without remapping the bloody things to where they should have been in the first place. Since then I have hated WASD as the stupid compromise it always was.

Every single PC keyboard I have used since... 1989?... has had cursor control in an inverted T. As did my Amiga 500 in 85 and my C64 (well almost) in 82.

Right Handed people need to adapt - The arrow keys are the future! Show some courage!

Arrow keys have an extremely crippling lack of surrounding supporting keys. Sure, maybe you can run around just fine on them. Pick up an item? Bit of a stretch to hit any key besides Ctrl or 0. If you've got a full sized keyboard, even those might be a stretch. Now add in the need for 3-4 or more supporting keys? Well, now arrows are just fucked.

Basically, you are completely wrong. Not even in sarcastic parody are you remotely close to making a good argument. Had you suggested the number pad, however, that would at least be more realistic.

I do believe this violates the definition of "laptop" and should be more referred to as a "portable computer". Anything that needs a monster cooling unit attached to the back is both too big and too hot to keep in one's lap anyways.

Anything, like this laptop, that ships with a suitcase, no longer clarifies as portable. It slots better under a "luggable" computer, like the old Compaq Portable.